If you think 2025 couldn’t get worse, Collins Dictionary awards ‘vibe coding’ the word of the year

If you’ve never heard of vibe coding, it’s the act of using generative AI and neutral language to code without actually writing a single line of code yourself. That’s just the kind of world we live in now. As an acknowledgement of this change, Collins Dictionary has awarded the term Word of the Year, despite, well, being two words.

This week, Collins Dictionary posted a blog celebrating and explaining its choice for the Word of the Year (via The Register). Vibe coding is relatively contentious in itself. Generative AI has been widely criticised for flagrantly ignoring copyright and for its adoption by investors declaring it’s the next big thing in games, movies, or whatever art form you hold dear. And that’s because there are productivity gains to be made in skipping through all the manual work of creative labour.

Of course, that comes with its own set of problems. An overreliance on the black box that is generative AI can make coders less able to actually fix their own problems when they inevitably pop up. As well as this, we’ve seen stories of AI coding tools ‘panicking’ and destroying entire databases, and coding assistants being vulnerable to targeted attacks.

That is to say, vibe coding is pretty contentious. The blog post from Collins Dictionary explains, “While tech experts debate whether it’s revolutionary or reckless, the term has resonated far beyond Silicon Valley, speaking to a broader cultural shift towards AI-assisted everything in everyday life.”

If you think vibe coding winning Word of the Year is bad, just wait until you see some of the runners-up. These include ‘aura farming’ (where one attempts to look cool through deliberate charismatic actions), ‘taskmasking’ (to fake being ultra productive), or ‘glaze’ (to praise someone, often with the connotation that you’re being disingenuous).

But, of course, like Time’s person of the year, Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year is not necessarily intended to be an endorsement of the word: just a reflection of the culture (look up who Time awarded man of the year in 1938 for arguably the biggest demonstration of this ‘importance does not equate to good’ principle).

Vibe coding winning Word of the Year is a demonstration of divide, of the changes that generative AI has wrought. Collins Dictionary says that words like vibe coding represent a pro-AI approach, where taskmasking and clanker (a joke slur for robots) represent an anti-AI sentiment. The blog argues words like glazing call out fakeness, while aura farming encourages it.

“In 2025, it’s more apparent than ever that people contain multitudes, and this year’s Word of the Year list encapsulates what it means to be human in the age of AI,” the blog post concludes. If you’ve gotta give a rational for using the word ‘vibe coding’, that’s a pretty good one.